A funny, sharp exercise in meta satire; a strange and unforgettable English crime flick; and reimagined beatless trance-pop

Roundup 09/18/2023

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and welcome to our weekly roundup column, in which I pick out some worthwhile and often overlooked books, articles, movies, and music to recommend to paying subscribers. For this week’s round-up I’ve got:

• A great metafictional satire of publishing, race, and the media;

• a strange and wonderful movie about criminals trying to land one last big score; and

• a compulsively listenable album of reimagined trance-pop.

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Now, the roundup. First, as always, a dispatch from the future: